A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  That winter, Nash spent more and more time in the Fine Hall common room, usually showing up at teatime and staying until evening. “He wore baggy, rumpled clothes,” Stefan Burr, then a graduate student, recalled. “He didn’t seem at all aggressive. In some ways his manner was not that different from a lot of mathematicians’.”29 For a while, Burr and Nash were playing endless games of Hex. The board in Fine had been drawn years before on heavy cardboard and was so worn that the lines had constantly to be redrawn with a ballpoint pen.

  He was beginning to seem less well again. Borel recalled, “He was not quite right. He seemed to me very diminished. His mathematics was not at the same level. I found him odd, unpredictable, nonsensical. It was very painful. The secretaries were afraid of him. He was someone to avoid. You never knew what he would do or say.”30

  One time the Borels had Alicia and Nash over for tea. “We served tea and cookies,” said Borel. “Nash went into the kitchen. I followed him. What do you want?’ I asked. Well, I’d like some salt and pepper.’ ”31 Gaby Borel added: “After he put salt and pepper in his tea, he complained that the tea tasted awful.”32

  During the spring, his state of mind had become more angry and restless, and he was beginning again to harp on his old obsessions. He decided, rather suddenly, to travel to the West Coast, where he saw, among others, Al Vasquez, who had graduated from MIT and was now a graduate student at Berkeley, Lloyd Shapley, and Al Tucker’s former wife, Alice Beckenback, and her new husband. Vasquez recalled:

  I just walked into the common room [at Berkeley] and he was there. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He didn’t announce his visits in advance. I had no idea where he was staying. But he was around for more than just a day or two. He hadn’t been looking for me. I had the impression that he’d been in Europe, the East Coast, and that he was traveling around. He talked a lot. He quite explicitly talked about [insulin] shock therapy. He described shock therapy as extremely painful. He also said he was taken back from Europe on a ship and in chains. Slavery was a word he used a lot. He was very bitter about his experiences.

  He was pretty disoriented. He wasn’t able to talk about anything else but his obsessions. I was put off. It was odd. I never did understand why he talked to me. He knew me. He wasn’t really trying to communicate. He wanted to talk elusively. [Yet] it wasn’t gibberish. It was even clever at times, full of puns and allusions.33

  Shapley, to whom Nash had written a great many letters, also found Nash’s appearance in Santa Monica distressing. “He thought of me as a close friend. One had to put up with it. He would send me postcards in colored inks. It was very sad. They were scribbled with math and numerology, as if he were not expecting a reply. I was much on his mind. He had decayed in a very spectacular way,” Shapley recalled in 1994. “He was groping.”34 Shapley remembered Nash telling him, “I have this problem. I think I can straighten it out if I can figure out which members of the Math Society did this to me.” He didn’t stay long, Shapley said, adding:

  It was a bit frightening. We had two young children. What was clear was that there was no way to talk to him or even follow what he was saying. He’d switch from topic to topic. It’s very hard to be a good mathematician if you can’t hold a thought in your mind.’35

  In June, Nash left for Europe. He was due to attend a conference in Paris in the last week in June and the World Mathematical Congress in Stockholm in^ early August. He went to London first, where he stayed at the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury, which he described as “very grand.”36

  He got himself a private postal box and was once again writing letters, some on toilet paper, in green ink, in French. He was also sending drawings, including one of a prostrate figure pierced with arrows. One, postmarked June 14, contained a scrap of paper with the following written on it in green ink: 2 + 5 + 20 + 8 + 12 + 15 + 18 + 15 + 13 = 78.

  The conference at the College de France in Paris was a small and intimate affair, very much dominated by Leray, who was very excited at that time about nonlinear hyperbolic equations. Ed Nelson, who had become quite friendly with Nash over the academic year, recalled Leray’s saying that it was a scandal that there were no global existence theorems. “The feeling he conveyed,” Nelson said, “was that we had better get to work, or the world might come to an end at any moment.”37 Most of the speakers gave their talk’s in English. Lars Hormander, who was also there, recalled that “1962 was very different from earlier visits.”38 But Nash insisted on giving his lecture in what he called his “pidgin French.”39 He did not speak extemporaneously but read from his notes in his very soft voice and with his very strong American accent. Hormander recalled: “Nash’s paper was respectable mathematically. It was a surprise to all of us [that he could have produced it at all]. For us it was like seeing somebody rise from the grave.”40

  His behavior, however, was decidedly odd, Hormander later said:

  Malgrange, the official conference organizer, had a dinner for the participants. At the table, Nash exchanged his plate with the person next to him. Then he traded yet again until he was satisfied that his food wasn’t poisoned. Everybody was very aware of his bizarre behavior but nobody said a word.

  Malgrange had bought a nice big jar of caviar which was being passed around. When the jar came to Nash, he tipped the entire thing upside down onto his plate. Everybody was very well-behaved and said nothing.41

  • • •

  While Nash was still in Paris, on July 2, his father-in-law died suddenly.42 Alicia attempted, through Milnor and Danskin, to contact Nash but was not successful. Carlos Larde was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul’s on Nassau Street.

  Nash, meanwhile, went back to London. What drew him to London is not clear, since his original plan had been, presumably, to spend the summer, except for the congress in Stockholm, as well as the following academic year, in Paris. In any event, Nash was still in London on July 24 when he wrote to Martha from the Hotel Stefan on Talbot Square.43 He apparently still intended to travel on to Stockholm. Addressing her as E-me-line, Martha’s middle name, he wrote that he was merely passing the time, with little to do, until the mathematical congress in Stockholm and was considering seeing a psychologist or visiting some sort of clinic.

  Danskin recalled that someone went looking for Nash and finally found him hanging around the Chinese embassy in London.44 The head of the MIT economics department took a group of business management people to London that summer. He suddenly saw John Nash and asked him, “Where are you now?” Puzzled, Nash replied, “Where are you?”45

  The International Mathematical Congress took place in the third week of August in Stockholm.46 Among the plenary speakers were Armand Borel, John Milnor, and Louis Nirenberg. The Fields Medals were awarded to Milnor and Lars Hormander, both of whom had been notified in May and instructed to tell no one, leaving each to sit on his secret while others around them speculated on the year’s likely winners.

  Nash, who felt that he should have been one of those honored, did not, however, go to Stockholm. He went to Geneva instead, returning to the Hotel Alba where he had spent his final week in December 1959 and writing in French to Martha “chez Charles L. Legg.”47 The letter made it clear that he was again thinking about the question of his identity! He drew an identity card with Chinese characters labeled “Des Secrets.” He wrote “Could you sign this carte d’identité … a man all alone in a strange world,” he wrote underneath. He sent Virginia another postcard with a picture of Geneva but mailed it from Paris.

  When Nash returned to Princeton at the end of summer 1962, he was extremely ill. A postcard addressed to Mao Tse-tung c/o Fine Hall, Princeton, New Jersey, arrived in the mathematics department. Nash had written only a cryptic remark in French about triple tangent planes.48

  Alicia let him move back in. He spent much of the fall at home with John Charles watching science-fiction programs on television, like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.49 He was writing a great many letters and making many phone calls to ma
thematicians in Princeton and elsewhere.

  He was still obsessed with the idea of asylum. A letter to Martha and Charlie, postmarked November 19, reads: “Maybe you will say that I’m mad … request to St. Paul’s in Princeton for sanctuary.”50 Nash apparently walked past St. Paul’s every day. The letter referred to the Ecumenical Council and previous letters he had written to the pastor of St. Paul’s earlier in the month. The letter ended with a reference to “past misfortunes, especially in the fall season.” In contrast to his letter to Martha from London, Nash no longer interpreted his difficulties as a sign of illness but rather as the results of machinations by the Ecumenical Council. By January, his letters to Martha and Charlie had become nearly incomprehensible, the thoughts skipping from Albanians to Stalin to “secrets can’t reveal” and “wood and nails of the true cross.”51

  Exhausted and dispirited by three years of turmoil and convinced that Nash’s condition was more or less hopeless, Alicia consulted an attorney and instituted divorce proceedings. She had married someone who she thought could look after her but couldn’t, who resented her bitterly, and who accused her of having malevolent intentions. To Martha and Virginia she wrote that being married was helping to create Nash’s problems and that she felt that being freed from the marriage would be better for him as well.52

  Alicia’s attorney, Frank L. Scott, a genial Princeton divorce lawyer with an office on Nassau Street, filed for a divorce the day after Christmas 1962.53 Alicia had given the formal go-ahead in a deposition a week earlier. According to the petition, Nash was still living with her at 137 Spruce Street. Alicia, meanwhile, temporarily rented a separate apartment on Vandeventer Street.54

  Alicia’s formal complaint read:

  On or about March 1959 it was necessary for the Plaintiff herein to cause the defendant to be committed to a mental institution from which the defendant was released on or about June 1959. Despite the fact that said committal was in the best interest of the defendant, the defendant became very resentful of the Plaintiff for causing his commitment, and declared he would no longer live with the Plaintiff as man and wife. Consistent with the defendant’s vow not to again live with the plaintiff as her husband, the defendant did in fact move into a separate room and refused to have marital relations with the plaintiff. In January 1961 defendant was caused to be committed to Trenton State Hospital by his mother from which he was released in June 1961. The defendant’s resentment of his wife and insistence that they no longer have marital relations continued after his release from the aforementioned commitment, as it had prior to said commitment, and has continued against the wishes of the plaintiff to the present date. The time during which defendant has thus deserted plaintiff and during which defendant was not confined to any institution but fully able to voluntarily resume marital relations, which he has not done, exceeds two years past and such desertion has been wilful, continuous and obstinate. Moreover defendant has failed to properly support plaintiff.55

  Nash was served with a summons. Scott visited Nash the following day. On April 17, Scott once again talked to Nash, who, he said, had “no plans for changing either his residence or his occupational status.” The judgment was rendered without a trial, granting a divorce and awarding Alicia custody of John Charles on May 1, 1963.”56 Final judgment was rendered August 2, 1963.57

  There is no evidence that Nash was opposed to the divorce. While the petition was a lawyer’s document and not necessarily true in its particulars — the Danskins, for example, maintained that Nash and Alicia never stopped sleeping together — Nash’s animosity toward Alicia was no doubt very real. He blamed Alicia for engineering his hospitalizations, he had threatened to divorce her while at McLean, and probably afterward as well, and he had made plans to live in France without her.

  Nash’s increasingly disturbed state, and rumors of his impending divorce, prompted a number of mathematicians to rally around him that spring. That Nash desperately needed treatment was not a subject of controversy this time. Once again, Donald Spencer and Albert Tucker approached Robert Winters.58 James Miller, a friend of Winters from Harvard, was in the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan and was connected with a university-sponsored clinic run by Ray Waggoner.59 Through Miller, Winters succeeded in making a unique arrangement whereby Nash would be treated at the clinic and also have an opportunity to work as a statistician in the clinic’s research program.

  Tucker at Princeton and Martin at MIT decided to set up a fund to make the Michigan plan feasible.60 Anatole Rappaport and Merrill Flood at the University of Michigan, Jürgen Moser at NYU, Alexander Ostrowski of Westinghouse, and others committed themselves to raise funds among mathematicians on Nash’s behalf.61

  The Ann Arbor group felt that a stay of two years was necessary. The cost for out-of-state patients was $9,000 a year or $18,000 for the entire stay. Virginia Nash offered to guarantee $10,000 and the group of mathematicians arranged, through the American Mathematical Society, to set up a fund-raising drive for the remaining $8,000. “If we are successful probably most of it will have to come from mathematicians who have known Nash,” Martin wrote. “If anything can be done which will enable Nash to return to mathematics, even on a very limited scale, it would of course be very fine not only for him but also for mathematics.”62

  Albert E. Meder, Jr., the society’s treasurer, was enthusiastic about the proposal, saying that “it would seem to me that it would be altogether appropriate for the AMS to receive contributions for the purposes set forth in [Martin’s] letter of March 25… . I would be inclined to go ahead.”63

  Nash’s increasingly bizarre behavior was triggering complaints, including some at the Institute for Advanced Study. Mostly these had to do with Nash’s writing mysterious messages on the institute blackboards and making annoying telephone calls to various members. But one day the switchboard operators, who sat in an office immediately as one entered Fuld Hall, were all abuzz because each person who was coming through the door was being doused with water. The institute’s dining hall was then on the fourth floor of Fuld, and it turned out, upon investigation, that Nash had been pouring water from the window above the main door.64

  It was Donald Spencer, a man who could not stand to see anyone in trouble without intervening, who was elected to try to convince Nash to accept the Michigan offer and enter the clinic voluntarily.65 Spencer chose, as he usually did, a bar as his venue. He invited Nash for some beers in Nassau Tavern, where Nash had once celebrated passing his generals. They sat in the booth for hours, Spencer downing warm martinis, Nash nursing a single beer. Spencer talked and talked; Nash appeared to be listening but said very little except to remark, at various intervals, that he wasn’t interested in doing statistical work. It was no use. Nash didn’t believe that he was ill, and he wasn’t prepared to enter another hospital.

  Years later, Winters wept when he recounted the story:

  I thought I had worked out a perfect solution to a most unusual problem. I thought I could save a very worthwhile person. I’m very emotionally tied to this. I thought I was doing something really wonderful. Jim Miller told me never let Nash get shock treatments. It takes the edge of genius off. Somebody sent him to Carrier, where they gave him shock treatments [sic], and I think it turned him into a zombie for many years. I consider that one of the worst failures of my life. When I look at the human race all over the world I think there’s zero reason for humanity to survive. We’re destructive, uncaring, thoughtless, greedy, power hungry. But when I look at a few individuals, there seems every reason for humanity to survive. He was worth doing the very best for.66

  Meanwhile, Alicia, Virginia, and Martha had agreed among themselves that Nash would have to be committed involuntarily. This time they chose a private clinic near Princeton. Martha wrote to Spencer:

  The only reason it has not been done before now is that my mother and I are waiting to hear from Alicia when she has arrangements made… . We really-had thought we would do this in March.

 
We were very hopeful that we could persuade John to go to the University of Michigan and take advantage of the opportunities for research and treatment there. Unfortunately John will not agree that he needs treatment. Since we feel that something must be done for him, we have placed him in Carrier… .

  He was simply not going to enter ANY hospital voluntarily. Once we were convinced of this we had no choice but to commit him to a hospital in New Jersey.67

  42

  The “Blowing Up” Problem Princeton and Carrier Clinic, 1963–65

  THE CARRIER CLINIC, formerly a sanatorium for the senile and retarded, was one of only two private mental hospitals in New Jersey. Located in the picturesque hamlet of Belle Meade, amidst rolling hills and lush farmland, Carrier was just five miles north of Princeton. Despite its easy proximity, however, it was generally avoided by Princetonians. As Robert Garber, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association who was Carrier’s medical director at the time, recalled: “They didn’t want to be in a psychiatric facility close to home. It was a disgrace, a terrible stigma, nothing like today. The idea was to get as far away as possible.”1

  Princetonians regarded Carrier, which had the look of a slightly seedy boarding school, with some distaste for another reason as well. Carrier had none of the prestige of top-of-the-line institutions like McLean, Austin Riggs, or Chestnut Lodge, whose academic affiliations, psychoanalytical orientation, and long-term approaches based on the “talking cure” were regarded, especially by academics, as more humane and appropriate, especially for the well-educated. Popular views of psychiatry were being shaped by One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and the libertarian views of Thomas Szasz, who held that insanity was a social construct rather than a symptom of disease.2 At the time when these views were gaining popularity, especially on campuses, Carrier had a reputation for the aggressive use of “chemical straitjackets” and electroshock, and short-term cookie-cutter approaches tailored to the time limits set by insurance policies.